Start a new Process that executes a delegate

Question

Is is possible in .NET to execute a method (delegate, static method, whatever) in a child process? System.Diagnostics.Process seems to require an actual filename, meaning that a separate executable is needed.

What I am trying to do is to verify, in a unit test, that an OS resource is cleaned up on process exit. I know that could use CodeDOM or IL generation to create such an assembly and execute it, but the whole point of unit tests is to isolate component parts, not to create complexity. For the same reason, I'd like to avoid a separate assembly altogether.

Ideally, I would do something like:

public static void CreateCounter()
{
    var counter = new PerformanceCounter("category", "counter", "instance");
    counter.InstanceLifetime = PerformanceCounterInstanceLifetime.Process;
}

[Test]
public void TestResourceDisposal()
{
    // Start child process to execute CreateCounter()
    ...
    // verify the resource is disposed
}

Answer 1

First of all, no, there's no way to do this. I process implies a .exe. This isn't Unix where you can fork a process that's a copy of the parent.

I'd just create a tiny .exe to run. Do you need to run the test with different performance counters? If it works with one, then surely it will work with any of them?